Everything transforms eventually, in one way or another. But, let me back up…
While 1981 saw the release of three rather large in scope werewolf films, An American Werewolf in London, The Howling and Wolfen, it was the year 2004 that ended up being the year of the werewolf for me.
Although, if I’m being honest, it was a year of horror movies in general. A year of discovery, of tracking down as many titles as I could to make up for lost time. A year of education, driven by online research, recommendations from trusted friends and, of course, cool DVD box art.
In the case of The Howling, it was the latter.
I had been gravitating more toward zombie films and slashers, An American Werewolf in London the only werewolf movie in my repertoire. While I had loved it, the flick was the only of its kind that I was familiar with, so I compartmentalized it as an anomaly and dove back into what I knew. That is, until I laid eyes on the jagged nails tearing through the dirty, blood speckled raised cover art of a different werewolf movie some weeks later.
At the time, I didn’t know who Joe Dante was. I had never heard of screenwriter John Sayles. I didn’t know the name Roger Corman. I had zero context for what I was about to see, the tonal ambiguity which hopped so effortlessly from self-awareness to effects driven wonderment to raw, brutal horror. All I knew was that I liked An American Werewolf in London and, again, that the cover looked pretty cool.
I watched it and… felt unimpressed. Detached in a way. I loved the effects, but the movie just didn’t connect with me. So, I set the DVD aside, forgot about it and moved on. There were plenty of movies left to discover, after all.
Years passed. My love of horror grew. I cultivated my own personal list of heroes in the genre, artists whose work I tended to love unequivocally. One of those names? Joe Dante.
Piranha (1978), Gremlins (1984), Innerspace (1987), The ‘Burbs (1989). I hadn’t seen it yet, but Matinee (1993) would eventually become one of my favorite films of all time. And then, of course, there was The Howling. An odd outlier in his filmography, a horror movie that most everyone loved but that I flat out didn’t like.
Then, in 2013, Scream Factory put The Howling out on blu-ray. Sure, I didn’t remember liking it, but that had been almost a decade prior and, while I didn’t consider it at the time, without the context of the voices behind the movie. I decided this was a chance to reappraise.
In 2004, I had no idea that Joe Dante was taking over the film from people who had already developed it. That he brought on screenwriter John Sayles (who had worked with him on the brilliantly self-aware Roger Corman production Piranha) to do a page one rewrite of Terence H. Winkless’ far more straight-laced adaptation of the novel of the same name. And I certainly didn’t know that Rick Baker was brought on to do the effects work, only to be called away based on a former commitment to John Landis for his werewolf movie An American Werewolf in London, providing Rob Bottin an opportunity to do the job.
Hell, I didn’t know all of those things in 2013, but I knew some of them. And I was learning more all the time. On that second viewing I noticed things I hadn’t before. I recognized Roger Corman at the phone booth. I picked up on the film’s dark sense of humor, the way it leveraged levity to feed into the dread and terror lurking in the shadows. That time, it seemed to fit right at home in Joe Dante’s filmography. I even thought I spotted a prop from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) somewhere in there.
The film had transformed.
Later, when I finally got a chance to read John Sayles’ draft of the screenplay, I discovered that sardonic sense of wit and dark awareness was present on the page. A perfect starting point for what would give way to Joe Dante’s signature tone, as sharp as it is engrossing. But, most of all, it paints a picture of the world without locking down the effects team to a sense of specificity. There’s still freedom, an encouraging sense of the imagination, something that Rob Bottin took full advantage of.
Still, nowhere are the effects of The Howling more impressive, then when Eddie Quist transforms. Gone is the frame-by-frame style transformation from the early days of cinema, replaced by elaborate special effects which present the shocking, pained metamorphosis in real time. As it happened concurrently alongside An American Werewolf in London, this sequence offers not a copy of Rick Baker’s groundbreaking work but a distinctly different take on the same idea.
Comparing the page to the screen in this instance offers a particularly fascinating perspective, as Sayles employed the character’s memories and dawning realization to create tension, while leaving the transformation largely ambiguous. In the film, it’s clear that Joe Dante and Rob Bottin evolved that concept from passive reflection to visceral action, all the while maintaining the core emotionality of what was described in the text.
The scene is beautifully (and horrifyingly) rendered, something I recognized even all of those years ago when I walked away cold. But that’s the beauty of movies like this, their stories and context don’t change, but you do. And, in that way, as cinema springs from words to pictures, everything transforms.
THE SCENE
Karen knocks on the office door. She enters, noticing the mess. She finds Terry’s body beneath a sheet and cries out. She covers Karen and recedes to the dangling phone on the desk. She attempts to call for help but finds no tone. She backs away, bumping into the gurney which had held Karen’s body. Eddie Quist emerges. Karen falls and backs away, bumping into Terry’s corpse. Eddie grits his teeth and starts to moan. His face contorts and begins to bubble around his cheeks, his brow and his temples. Karen watches fearfully. His body contorts and transforms into a wolf as Karen watches. Karen feels behind her for a jar of acid, thrusting the liquid onto the wolf. The wolf roars, its skin sizzling amidst smoke. Karen escapes from the room.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
INT. DOC’S OFFICE — NIGHT
as Karen KNOCKS from outside—
KAREN (off)
Doc? Doc?
Karen opens the door, looks in—
The script is written in a train-of-thought manner, maintaining the pace and energy of each scene it describes as though one were watching instead of reading. After a few pages, the style becomes a part of the storytelling, making the screenplay a breezy and engaging read and lending to its unique ability to visualize.
Still, the words offer no sense of specific onscreen style. The film opens in a wide shot of the disheveled office. Karen appears distorted through the small window on the door, knocking and calling for the doctor. Dim light, falling through what is presumably window blinds peppers the left side of the frame, providing the only illumination. The shot is noir-like and evokes a feeling of mystery and deception.
The camera tracks with Karen as she enters, some added dialogue allowing the viewer to follow her train-of-thought as she moves slowly through the space. The script calls for A puddle of blood on the examination room floor as a signifier of what’s to come, but the film allows Karen to move to the shrouded gurney on her own, as it’s the only logical point of interest set out before her.
Terry lies half-covered by a sheet on the exam table, throat bloody, eyes open and staring, blood running down an arm that hangs off the table…
Following the text almost verbatim, the film flashes a medium close up shot of Terry’s upper-body. Her eyes are blood red and her throat has been torn open, some of the pooling blood glistening in a way that almost looks like its moving. The block of text goes on to explain precisely the actions that Karen takes: She turns, trembling, and we FOLLOW her out to the phone. She lifts the receiver— the phone is dead.
The text continues like that, again matter-of-factly, providing the reader a somewhat cold interpretation but one that allows the narrative to be told without sapping the creatives of their ability to invent. Yes, Karen walks to the phone and lifts the receiver, but she fumbles with it. Gets frustrated with herself about it for a split-second, her capacity for emotional control now having been pushed beyond her limits.
The character touches broaden the scope of the scene, help the viewer relate to the individual onscreen and view these moments as the culmination of her repression exploding out of its holding place. The script describes her looking at the body on the table… motionless under the sheet. Then, POUNCH! A SCREECH OF MUSIC as EDDIE leaps up from under the sheet to grab Karen—
The film breathes a bit more, offering an odd, wheezing sound to distract Karen and distort her senses. The soundscape of the film has been integral in breaking down Karen’s ability to trust her senses and her internal compass that directs her toward what she perceives to be sane thought (i.e. the howling). Now, the otherworldly call is leading her to the truth. She follows it, but backward. In an unscripted move, she backs up toward the sound, toward the gurney with Terry’s body on it, perhaps because even though she knows she must seek it, she is not yet ready to face the answer she has so desperately sought.
She backs into the gurney and then Eddie emerges. In the script, there is a struggle: Eddie hangs on to Karen, they crash backwards and Karen twists as they hit the floor. Karen scrambles under the exam table to escape him. It’s after this that Karen runs into Terry’s body. This is similarly streamlined in the film, the shock of Eddie’s appearance causing Karen to fall and crawl away until she comes face to face with her dead friend’s relocated body.
Instead of a violent back and forth, the viewer receives an eerily calm conversation. The sequence is presented in the same straight forward manner as the script, shot-reverse-shot, with Eddie greeting Karen and telling her “I’m glad you came”. The script says nothing about his appearance or demeanor.
Eddie’s hair is dark, long and wild. His eyes are blood red, similar to Terry’s. His face is dark and greasy, his skin like leather. Worst of all, he’s smiling. A calm, pleasant smile which exudes confidence and righteousness. As they talk, they move through the dim, slatted light being cast into the room. The scene feels right out of a black and white crime picture, a climactic sequence where story revelations and emotions bubble up to the surface.
This is where the film deviates more dramatically from the script. At this point, the script introduces something it refers to as DREAM FLASH moments interspersed as the two talk. The flashes harken back to Karen’s experience with Eddie in the booth at the beginning of the film, revealing the truth behind her repressed memories and the face of the monster she had in her mind all along.
The film does away with these, allowing the brief conversation to take place and for Karen’s realization to occur in the moment, rather than in the past. Eddie’s final words to her before transforming are, “Here I am, Karen. Look at me” and “I wanted to give you a piece of my mind. I trusted you, Karen.” Then, the script says simply, Standing with his back to a closed door, Eddie SNARLS and turns into a werewolf.
That’s it. No description. Just, turns into a werewolf.
The next several minutes of screen time are devoted to those 4 words. The film stops here, the narrative halts and the thing revels in the transformation at hand as if it were the event the entire piece was built around.
In a close up shot, Eddie pulls at a wound in his scalp, groaning painfully. Karen watches, utterly appalled but transfixed. Eddie digs into his head and removes a chunk of himself. The image cuts to a side view to the right of his head as his neck, cheeks and brow begin to jutter, puffing in and out rhythmically as their structures change. His eyes open wide, a flat white, and he releases an animalistic growl. His hand extends out in front of him in a close-up. Five, razor-sharp claws emerge, each slicing through the flesh of its respective fingertip, leaving trails of blood in their wake. His chest and shoulders heave, expanding amidst the sounds of snapping bones and gurgling flesh.
There are a handful of cuts, but each new close up holds an impressive, moving effect, making it easy to follow the mutation from shot to shot. Every new shot of Karen reflects her increasing sense of disgust, realization and somewhat cathartic validation, a reflection that her perceived psychosis is not an ailment but a reaction to seeing what she had hitherto believed to be impossible.
As Eddie finishes his transformation into full-blown wolf, the viewer watches as his snout extends from his leathery skin, popping and snapping as it breaks away from his skull. A row of sharp, glistening teeth shimmering threateningly in the dull light is the last the viewer sees before the full grown wolf stands before his chosen mate, growling but not attacking.
Here, the film catches back up to the script, She grabs the nearest thing to her, a jar of some kind of liquid sitting on the back shelf among the Doc’s medicine and tongue depressors. The same happens in the film, only during the final moments of Eddie’s transformation. As in the script, the moment the wolf has calmed and is standing before her in plain sight, she hurls the liquid from the jar at Eddie. The script calls for Eddie to duck and for most of the liquid to hit the door, only to have Karen and Eddie struggle some before she finally splashes him in the face. After, Eddie SCREAMS, then leaps, CRASHING out the window.
In keeping with the simplicity of staging and narrative action the film generally employs, the movie instead opts to waste no time. The acid hits the wolf directly in the face the first time Karen throws it. He does not see it coming, after all. The wolf screeches and howls in pain. White smoke fills the space as its hair and skin burn. Karen turns and escapes the room, exiting in the same wide shot in which she entered.
The truth has been revealed and Karen’s memory restored, now it’s the repercussions of knowing which will haunt and stalk the film’s intrepid reporter. As it turns out, in some cases, knowledge can be just as life-threatening as ignorance, but at least it’s concrete.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“It was probably the most extensive transformation ever done up until that time,” Director Joe Dante said in his commentary track for The Howling found on the Scream Factory blu-ray disc. He continued, “It’s the scene that made the movie a lot of money, but it’s also a showstopper.”
Art is transformative, both in how it affects one’s point of view and how one’s point of view can affect it. The Howling I saw in 2004 was the same one I saw again in 2013, but… it was different. I was different. The key is not to feel like you need to be ahead of things, or fearful that you might fall behind, but to be open to new interpretations, refreshed points-of-view and opportunities to constantly challenge and evolve your own perspective.
Transformation is built into the DNA of the filmmaking process and nowhere is that more apparent than in effects-heavy films. Sometimes that means guidance, words on the page and a director’s vision. However, the benefits of understated simplicity are often undeniable.
“They came and showed me this script,” Rob Bottin recalled in the feature “Making a Monster Movie: Inside The Howling” found on the film’s disc, “and in the script it just says, ‘Eddie changes into a werewolf.’ And I said usually in scripts you have a description of what happens and the director has a very precise idea… [but] they said do whatever you want to do as long as it’s good.”
When it came to bringing the werewolf to life, it was an extensive process. “Sometimes we’d have to wait almost an entire day… for Bob to put that makeup on,” Joe Dante said in his commentary. In the same commentary, actor Robert Picardo recalled, “it took about four and a half hours for the face and then the chest from the neck down took another four and a half hours.”
From bladders on his face (that according to Robert Picardo were “condoms actually”) to mechanical heads which replaced the actor all together, the sequence is one of the most elaborate, extensive effects transformations the cinema has ever seen. It was what stuck with me, even when the film did not. But, when I went back to the movie, even that perfect scene had changed.
It was no longer just cool, but something to be researched. Looked into. Understood on a technical level. Something that drove me to read the screenplay. To discover the many voices and perspectives that went into turning those words into realities, those characters into flesh and blood human beings. To find out how it was they went about turning a man into a monster.
I’ll always think back fondly on 2004 and my year of horror, the good and the bad. Right, wrong or indifferent, my opinions at the time were my own and were informed by who I was and where I was coming from. And as they grow and evolve, they’re made all the richer by my past experiences and the benchmarks which represent their change. You never know what something might become.
For example, this anecdote that Joe Dante talked about in his commentary:
“Sometimes the motors would jerk and things would pop and those were actually mistakes because originally the idea was that this was all going to be a very smooth transition but when the sound effects people put bones crunches and pops on them it made it seem even more unpleasant.”
How many mistakes became effective parts of films we love we’ll never know— but in the context of the movie, as long as it works, who really cares? None of it really matters, what matters is the experience the viewer has and takes away from it.
And the beauty of experience is that it’s constantly changing. Evolving. Transforming.
After all, everything transforms eventually, in one way or another. Know what I mean?
The Howling (1981): Written by John Sayles and Terence H. Winkless & Directed by Joe Dante
